Should Obama “Disown” Reverend Wright?

Some pundits like Byron York, and Andrew Sullivan are offering Obama free advice, strongly suggesting that he “disown” Reverend Wright.

York:

“I think he’s going to have to walk farther away from Wright, if he wants to win the general election,” one Democratic strategist told me Monday night. “He could say, ‘This is different now. Just to eliminate any questions, I am going to leave this church, because I believe the country is more important.’ It would say that Wright’s rhetoric has no place in his campaign or the lives of his children.” (As the Wright controversy has festered, observers on both sides of the political divide have wondered, usually in whispers, about Obama’s decision to take his young children to Wright’s church.)

Sullivan:

Obama needs not just to distance himself from Wright’s views; he needs to disown him at this point. Wright himself, it seems to me, has become part of what Obama is fighting against: the boomer, Vietnam era’s obsession with its red-blue, white-black, pro and anti-America fixations. That is not what this election needs to be about; and Wright’s massive, racially divisive and, yes, bitter provocation requires a proportionate response.

We need a speech or statement from Obama in which he utterly repudiates this poison, however personally difficult that may be, however damaging the impact will be.

Second of all, what can he possibly say as a means to explain how he was able to sit in Reverend Wright’s pews for 20 years, and listen to that garbage? He can “disown” Wright all he wants, but he can’t disown his participation in that loathsome church for 20 years; a church that practices the profoundly racist Black Liberation Theology.

He, and Wright, and the media can spin spin spinall they want that Wright was taken out of context, but the American people, (the majority, anyway) are not such ignorant buffoons that they would believe such unmitigated bullcrap. The unedited versions of his sermons, taken completely in context, (which he sells in his own church giftshop!) are even worse.

So to say that Obama just needs to “disown” his Pastor of twenty years doesn’t cut it. But don’t tell the panicky nutroots that. They’re still holding on to hope, (and change).

What Obama really needs to do is drop out before he does any more damage to race relations in this country.

UPDATE:

GOP operatives, always slow on the uptake, are finally noticing Obama’s weaknesses, and are preparing a $500,000 hit on him. Something tells me it’s going to be lukewarm, and unsatisfying:

Whereas Obama once seemed an almost cultlike figure who transcended race and class, the narrative that has emerged from his campaign’s recent trials has given Republicans hope that the Illinois senator can be tagged as an elitist with the same effectiveness with which Michael Dukakis and John F. Kerry were so labeled.

The elitist story line has provided Republicans with press release fodder against freshman Democratic House members and statewide elected officials in roughly two dozen states.

Whoa, Nellie! Hardcore! Elitist, eh?

The guy’s got our nations enemies, tin-pot dictators, known commies, radical pinkos, (and Reverend Wright) supporting him; he’s buds with a former terrorist, for crying out loud, and the best they can do is try to paint him as an elitist?